The exhibit is called Most Wanted, I suppose referencing Warhol’s America’s Most Wanted series, silkscreen paintings of dangerous criminals on the lam. Here Phillips is presenting realistic likenesses via traditional handmade paintings of young movie stars: Chace Crawford, Kristen Stewart, Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Momsen, Dakota Fanning, Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift and Robert Pattison. Phillips has already mined fashion, advertising and porn says the release, so what is left? Young, very young, actors!
Perhaps after Popes and Princes, Marilyns and Jackies all that is left is Chace and Dakota. From Liz Taylor to Taylor’s Momsen and Swift. Warhol put celebrities on pedestals now we seem to rather enjoy their long, hard public falls from grace. Or do we?
While I wouldn’t know a Chace from a Dakota, I suppose my kids are fully versed/immersed in the subject matter. Compared to the recent batch of paintings and sculptures allegedly of Kate Moss at least the few celebs I did know were recognizable in Phillips’ work. Is he playing to the youth market? Is this Phillips’ ideal notion of beauty (or his conception of ours) as found in today’s heartthrobs and starlets? These faces are forever young, faultlessly beautiful and are what we most admire as a society and culture (at the box office, anyway). Is this body of work a reductive flash in the pan; no more than empty fodder for shallow (art) consumers?
Maybe painting by hand is the new radical, compared to the over fabrication practices (bordering on fetishism) and lack of traditional abilities exhibited by many artists in the recent past. Maybe realistic likenesses are as shocking and “unsettling” as the gallery would let us believe.
These paintings are in the end easy on the eye and immediately gratifying. Are these eye candies our most coveted objects of desire, or our mortal enemies? Somehow I doubt the artist and collectors much care.
Kenny Schachter